Frameskipping is extremely aggressive

[setzer22]

Hi,

I've been a dolphin user for quite some time now, and I've registered to comment on what seems to be some kind of bug regarding frameskipping.

Recently, I've been wanting to play Skies of Arcadia Legends (the Gamecube version) on my laptop. My laptop is a weird machine, though, since it has a very powerful processor (i7-3630QM@2.40Ghz) when compared to my GPU (Nvidia GT610, 2GB). Because of this, I have reasons to suspect that my current bottleneck for gaming is clearly the GPU.

I assume my current CPU should be more than enough for a such a game, but clearly something is lacking, since at some points I get FPS drops (from 30 to 20-something). Becaues of this, I wanted to try frameskipping, which is said to help in the cases in which the GPU is the bottleneck. To my surprise, when enabling a frameskipping of 1 the game gets extremely slow (less than a frame per second, despite the FPS counter still showing the same value between 20 and 30). When setting it to 9 the behavior is slightly different. The game runs smoothly for some frames (could be 9? I don't know) and then it hangs for about a second.

I assume this is not the correct behaviour of frameskipping, because that would make it a rather useless feature, so I'm assuming something is either wrong with my setup (running on Linux, btw) or the game (I haven't seen anything about frameskipping and SoA in the Wiki).

Any input on this would be much appreciaed, thanks!

[JosJuice]

Frameskipping is in fact a rather useless feature. It was removed from Dolphin shortly after the release of 5.0. I'm not saying it never reduces the GPU load, but it does cause weird problems in a number of games, and the reduction in GPU load usually doesn't matter.

[admin89]

Quote:since it has a very powerful processor (i7-3630QM@2.40Ghz) when compared to my GPU (Nvidia GT610, 2GB).

Your GPU is poor but it should be fine if you run game at native resolution . On the other hand , your CPU isn't fast for Dolphin at all
In fact , 2.4GHz CPU is slow for most games even if it's an i7
Perhaps , you should check what frequency your CPU is running . You can force it to run at higher frequency by using Throttlestop

[Shonumi]

(02-19-2017, 12:12 AM)JosJuice Wrote: Frameskipping is in fact a rather useless feature. It was removed from Dolphin shortly after the release of 5.0.

Not only useless, but a confusing feature because it didn't work how most users expected it. I'm surprised some people even know to use it for (possibly) reducing GPU loads.

[setzer22]

(02-19-2017, 01:00 AM)admin89 Wrote: Your GPU is poor but it should be fine if you run game at native resolution . On the other hand , your CPU isn't fast for Dolphin at all
In fact , 2.4GHz CPU is slow for most games even if it's an i7
Perhaps , you should check what frequency your CPU is running . You can force it to run at higher frequency by using Throttlestop

Thanks for your input. I never suspected my CPU could be the bottleneck in my system for dolphin... I'm under linux so there's no Throttlestop for me, but I will check the clock speed when running dolphin, thanks for the tip!

Quote:JosJuice:
Frameskipping is in fact a rather useless feature. It was removed from Dolphin shortly after the release of 5.0. I'm not saying it never reduces the GPU load, but it does cause weird problems in a number of games, and the reduction in GPU load usually doesn't matter.

But the feature must've been somehow failing for that particular game, right? The intended behavior for "Frameskip 1" cannot be the game running at 1FPS, it would've never made it to the UI if it were the case. Anyway, thanks for the help!

[JosJuice]

(02-19-2017, 04:30 AM)setzer22 Wrote: But the feature must've been somehow failing for that particular game, right?

Yes. But this is far from the only game that has serious problems with frameskipping.